Franz Joseph Liszt

Franz Liszt was a Hungarian composer and virtuoso pianist of the Romantic era whose performing and compositional career spanned more than 60 years and reshaped both the piano and the symphonic poem. He was born on October 22, 1811, in Doborján, in the Kingdom of Hungary (today Raiding, Austria), and gave his first public concert at the age of nine. His family moved to Vienna in 1822, where he studied piano with Carl Czerny and composition with Antonio Salieri.

He settled in Paris in 1823 and from the early 1830s, after hearing Niccolò Paganini, he set out to remake piano technique. The years from 1839 to 1847 — his "Glanzzeit" (years of splendour) — saw him tour from Lisbon to Constantinople, drawing crowds whose enthusiasm the poet Heinrich Heine called "Lisztomania." He largely retired from the concert platform in 1847 and from 1848 served as Kapellmeister at the court of Weimar.

At Weimar he conducted the premiere of Wagner's Lohengrin in 1850 and developed the form of the single-movement symphonic poem in 13 works including Les Préludes and Tasso. His piano output includes the Transcendental Études, Années de pèlerinage, the B-minor Sonata (1853), and the 19 Hungarian Rhapsodies. His sacred works Christus and The Legend of Saint Elisabeth reflect the minor Catholic orders he received in Rome in 1865.

His daughter Cosima married, successively, the conductor Hans von Bülow and Richard Wagner, who was also Liszt's son-in-law and friend. He divided his last years between Rome, Weimar and Budapest and died of pneumonia in Bayreuth on July 31, 1886, while attending the Wagner festival.

His name Franz is the German short form of Franziskus, the German form of Francis, from the Late Latin Franciscus meaning "Frenchman" or "free man." It is a masculine name long popular in German-speaking and Hungarian Catholic milieux.